Today is the day! Welcome to Kafka Summit San Francisco 2017!

A huge number of people have been hard at work to make today happen. Our speakers have been writing presentations and preparing to teach their audiences about new Apache Kafka^® features and new production use cases. A huge event team and venue staff are up early getting ready for the day. It would be fair to say we’re excited for the day!

Last night started with a pre-Summit gathering of committers and members of the Apache Kafka community on the 46th floor of the Hilton.

We’ll be live streaming the keynotes starting at 9:00 am PDT. We’ve got three talks queued up this morning: one by Confluent co-founder and CTO, Neha Narkhede; one by Stitch Fix’s VP of Engineering, Randy Shoup; and one by Salseforce’s own Pat Helland. Jump on the YouTube live stream to see what’s new in the world of Kafka and get fresh insights into how to build the next-generation distributed systems you were probably working on just before the live stream started. If you can’t make it to the Summit itself, I know you’ll appreciate watching those three talks live. Trust me.

And if you are here today, keep these awesome things in mind:

• Do you have questions? We have answers. Stop by the Ask Me Anything booth with your hardest Kafka issues and get help from an expert. Want to debate microservices with Ben Stopford or talk about your favorite connector with Gwen Shapira? Now’s your chance! The booth will be open all day, so stop by.
• Jay Kreps will be signing copies of I Heart Logs in the Confluent booth at 7:45 am on Monday morning, so stop by to chat with one of the Kafka creators and receive a signed book. And, if you haven’t heard by now, the full edition of Kafka: The Definitive Guide is now available. And even better: we have some to give away! Come get a signed edition by all three authors (that’s by Neha Narkhede, Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino) at the Confluent booth at 3:20 pm. Books are limited for both signings, so get on it!
• And have you heard? Apache Kafka is turning 1.0 this year, and we’re celebrating by throwing a party after Kafka Summit. Join us in the Yosemite Room at 6 pm tonight for drinks and food trucks to celebrate this milestone and thank the community for their not-inconsiderable efforts over the years. We can’t wait to see you there!

If you can’t make it today, rest assured that video of all 32 talks—on topics like stream processing, production use cases, internals, and more, all given by real-life practitioners and global experts—will be available in a few weeks. And if you are here, don’t forget to download the mobile app for real-time updates throughout the day. Then just sit back and enjoy the show! We’re thrilled to be here with you.